August 25, 2020
YOUNGSTOWN – After hearing four days of prosecution witnesses in the pesky murder trial of Larenz Rhodes, jurors heard a rebuttal Monday from defense attorney Frank Cassese.
Cassese did not provide any witnesses to the defense, however, provided the final arguments of the election theory as to who was driving a car on January 24, 2019 in Crystal Hernandez’s apartment and fired 25 shots with an AK-47 attack rifle at his home.
The police found her dead when they arrived. Your 2-year-old sleeps unharmed in the chest.
The jury then deliberated for three hours before returning home at night. Deliberations resume today at nine o’clock in the morning.
Rhodes, 20, is one of many young men accused of shooting Hernandez in his McBride Street apartment at the end of a day-long fight involving her boyfriend, Gabriel Smith, 20. Array, but Hernandez and his son were there.
Three co-hired people who pleaded guilty earlier testified at trial. Three others are awaiting trial.
Cassese warned in his comments that one of the co-cons who testified, Martize Daniels, 20, was the driving force and the shooter, not Rhodes. And Cassese said the witnesses they said otherwise are “partial” and are not credible because of the plea agreements they have concluded.
Cassese noted that Daniels had been charged with an annoying homicide over Hernandez’s death and had been qualified this way for almost a year. He pleaded guilty last January to a crime attack rate opposed to Smith in early January 24, 2019.
Daniels and others testified that Daniels was shot in the leg with shotgun pellets in early January 24, went to the hospital this afternoon and stayed home that same night when six of his friends went to McBride Street to get revenge on Smith.
But Cassese showed jurors two surveillance footage: one in a Rhodes multicolored jacket was dressed in a showdown at the Speed Check fuel station on McGuffey Road around 1:30 a.m. on January 24, 2019, and another in a black jacket out of Hernandez. . Murder.
Witnesses said Rhodes was the type in any of the photos, but Cassese said “no witness at any time stated that Larenz Rhodes had replaced the garments. He then showed shots of other men accused of shooting in the house. None of them replaced their garments between the first incident and the murder, he said.
In addition to Daniels, co-inmates Joquaun Blair, 23, and Burton McGee, 21, testified, implicating Rhodes as a shooter.
In reaction to Cassese’s accusations, Assistant District Attorney Robert Andrews said jurors deserve to focus on the evidence actually presented at the trial and not pay attention to “those far-fetched concepts that the defense rules out.”
Andrews said a scientist from the Bureau of Criminal Identification said Rhodes was the “main contributor” to DNA discovered on the guide wheel and on the driver’s door of a dark Kia he noticed in a surveillance video near Hernandez’s apartment.
The DNA expert said that when other people were driving a car, the DNA that appears to be that of the user who last drove it, Andrews said. The car was discovered the next day not far from Hernandez’s apartment.
Who cares?
As for the picture of the guy known through witnesses like Rhodes dressed in other clothes: “Who cares what he dressed up with?” Andrews says.
The first photo taken around 1:30 a.m. Rhodes told a Youngstown police detective who headed south on the night of January 24, 2019. You may have simply replaced your garments there,” Andrews said.
Cassese said Rhodes only had a seventh-grade education, that he might not read, that he was homeless, and that he “didn’t have a mother or father to raise him.” Cassese said these things made him vulnerable to being the “scapegoat” who took the blame for someone else.
District Attorney Kevin Trapp’s assistant told jurors in an oral argument that one of the most productive evidence of Rhodes’ guilt is the testimony of Blair, who admitted to being one of six who went to Hernandez’s apartment and shot him.
“He didn’t want to downplay anything,” Trapp said of Blair, “including his own” role in space filming. “Admitted, “I fired several times at the time, ” the Array45, ” said Trapp.
Blair knew Rhodes as the driving force behind the car that took Blair and Johntez Scrivens, 21, to Hernandez’s apartment, Trapp said. Blair would know Rhodes was in his six because Blair “sat next to him” in the car. Blair’s DNA was discovered in the front passenger seat, Trapp said, adding that Blair wore a giant Nike swoosh on his jacket while sitting in the front passenger seat. The shooting took place at victory Estates apartments on the east side.
Trapp said DNA evidence indicated that an AK-47 was the gun that killed Hernandez. Andrews said the final argument that a BCI scientist said an AK-47 “could be the weapon that killed Crystal Hernandez.”
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